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My friend (Vic) and I have been slowly designing our own game system for years. When it started, the idea was to do a clone of our favorite game system. This was a game that we both love to play, which shall remain nameless because I don’t want that to serve as a distraction to the main point. The only thing that matters is that we love to play it.

On our first session, I proposed an exercise: Create a table of the broad gaming elements that we don’t like about the system, the ones we like about the system that need no improvement, and the ones we like about the system that need improvement. There were 6 likes, 5 likes requiring improvement, and 9 dislikes. That is, there were more dislikes than likes. Only about 1/4 of the broad categories we identified needed no improvement in our opinions, and therefore had to be maintained in our new system. Gaming is, as we all know, about having fun, so logical breakdowns aren’t always a good predictor of whether any given individual will like the game. Remember, this apparent disaster (about half of it we dislike) is our favorite game system, and that’s not because we didn’t legitimately love playing it. Don’t be afraid to criticize what you love, including your own work. Whether you’re designing a game or picking and choosing which rules to use at your table for an existing game, try things out and make decisions based on your own sensibilities.

All of this reinforced a lesson I learned a long time ago: Nothing is perfect. You (and others) can always reasonably criticize even your favorite [fill in the blank], and there’s nothing wrong with that.

You Do You

I’ve spent the past several months publishing posts criticizing various gaming systems as a reaction to my impending return to 1st Edition AD&D (including 1e itself). My blog’s audience isn’t very big, and I’m not even sure how seriously anyone takes me. However, if you’re designing a game system and have ever heard criticism from anyone, even an established game designer, that claims you’re going in the wrong direction, never lose sight of the fact that the only person that knows the right direction is you. You should design the game you want to design. Maybe it’ll be a commercial failure, and not just because there’s too much competition. Maybe most people simply won’t like it, but maybe fewer would like it, including you, if you weren’t honest in your approach. It’s also easily possible that all those critics might really enjoy your game despite its inclusion of gaming elements they criticize.

Listen to the critics but form your own opinion. Design the game you want to design. If a career as a game designer isn’t in the cards, you should accept that. At least you’ll have done the best job you’re capable of doing, but perhaps, with persistence, future redesigns may result in something you and everyone else likes.

And you certainly shouldn’t get upset that someone else’s work is being criticized. 🙄

This post reads like a Roxette song.

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I spent about $53 on this dice tower from GameStop, which arrived today. There were only two left when I bought it, but don’t worry. At that price, you would probably have chickened out anyway. On the other hand, saying there were only two left was probably a ploy to encourage me to buy it. Wasted effort. I knew I was going to buy it the moment I saw it.

I really hate my voice. Anyway, if you really want to waste some money, you can pay $250 for it, or $2,000 for a 1st print (i.e., the one with the most errors in it) Monster Manual. People are idiots. EDIT: I just received notification it dropped to $1,700! What a steal!

And if you’re wondering about the image I have as my wallpaper, here it is.

Everyone that knows me will assume that the video is doctored. I don’t roll natural 20s, even with help.

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My social media discussions on the 1st Edition AD&D (“1e”) stat blocks for archdevils and demon lords gave me a thought that I doubt is in any way controversial, but there’s certainly a counter opinion to it. I was asking how one would determine the hit dice of, for example, Asmodeus, when it isn’t given in the 1e Monster Manual. His stat block simply gives his hit points as 199, which isn’t evenly divisible by any of the D&D dice (not even the virtual d3). The answer was given in appendix E of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which provides the THAC0 – yes, there’s THAC0 in 1e! – for all of these creatures. In this discussion, someone brought up Lolth’s unusually low hit point total (66), but her stat block also gives her hit dice as a parenthetical, so I assumed that by the Fiend Folio, everyone figured out how bad the omission was. Interestingly enough, that’s incorrect, because both Bahamut and Tiamat in the Monster Manual have both their hit points and hit dice disclosed in their respective stat blocks. I have no idea why the archdevils and demon lords weren’t given express hit dice.

But now I’m off on a tangent. Let me get back to my non-controversial point. When 4e came out, there was a design decision to allow PCs to fight the gods themselves. Though some sources said these were mere avatars, some referred to them as the actual gods. I remember in one of Paizo’s adventure paths released around the time of (just before?) Pathfinder, the adventure ended with 20th-level characters facing Demogorgon, with the option of one of them replacing Demogorgon as the head asshole in charge in the Abyss. Clearly that was the Demogorgon they were facing. Back then (which isn’t that long ago), I thought that was awesome. “Epic” level mortals should be dealing with world-ending events that affect the galaxy as a whole, if not the entire universe. That’s sounds both epic and divine. This was consistent with how I approached the 1e Deities and Demigods as a kid, which I thought was an invitation for PCs to fight gods, steal their shit, and wreak havoc. (Who reads the preface of any of these books? Certainly not I.)

My discussions on 1e have brought me back to Oerth so to speak. As “epic” as mortals are, they’re still mortal. There should still be a line drawn between the mortal world and the divine world, even if mortals can get a good glimpse of that higher plane. If mortals want to fight gods (not merely their avatars), then they should ascend to godhood to do it, but that would be another game altogether. My friend and I have discussed this a bit for our game, and my thought is that we should allow fights with the divine at ultra-high levels only if the game system itself changed in some significant way at those levels. The underlying engine would be the same, but it would feel very different, thus justifying the jump in the PCs’ competition. For 3.5 and 4e players that have played epic level in those systems, I’m talking about deviations that go beyond what those editions provided. In those systems, epic level was merely lower levels but with bigger numbers. There must be a greater change than that because I imagine fighting an actual god would require more than what mortals usually employ. I threw out a couple of ideas that I think might work, but I’m not giving those away just yet. 🙂

In any event, no one is fighting the Asmodeus in my 1e games unless they have a death wish.

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There are two things I want to say about aquatic adventures, one bad and one good. First, I’m going to whine.

They’re Cheap

During the 4th Edition days, we had the Living Forgotten Realms living campaign, and a handful of those adventures were underwater. How do humans, elves, etc. deal with water breathing? They buy potions of water breathing. Duh. What if they can’t afford it because they’re low level? Does no one get to play and we send everyone home? Nope. Their employer buys the potions for them.

Wait, what? Doesn’t that trivialize aquatic adventures? Why would anyone pay for the potions? Just say, “Well, my character just bought a ton of gear and has no coins on hand.” Either way, it just feels cheap to me (though no different than potions of flying for aerial battles). You should always get to play, but you should always have to pay a cost. You could have varying strengths of water breathing potions, but what would that mean? You can either breathe water or not. If the duration of a potion were shorter, you’d have to buy more, which again would be cost-prohibitive for lower-level adventurers. Moreover, if you don’t have to pay a cost, why not write the adventure for land and stick the characters on difficult terrain?

I don’t know how to solve this problem, though I have a theoretical approach. The brilliance of healing surges (for 5e players, hit dice, but a bit more brilliant than that) is that they introduced a different economy to the game. While there was some connection between healing surges and currency (healing potions cost 50 gp and let you trigger healing surges), they were kind of their own thing, being innate to the character rather than something bought. In other words, somehow your Constitution score needs to come into play for underwater combat, but failure shouldn’t necessarily be fatal, as that would bring the adventure to a halt for the most unheroic of reasons.

In 1st Edition, players have bought in to something like this being the cost of doing business as an adventurer, so in 1e, aquatic adventures were probably unavailable until higher levels when water breathing potions were affordable. There’s a logic to that, as higher-level characters are always going to be able to do cooler things than lower-level characters, and every edition from 1e to 5e has some really cool aquatic creatures. However, modern gamers tend to be turned off by that, so maybe aquatic adventures will always be cheap in newer editions. I wish I had an answer, because . . .

3d Maps

I can use my air combat mapping idea for underwater combat. I bought some acrylic squares (Home Depot), drew grids on them (Sharpie), and superglued Legos to them. The effect: A flexible method of stacking layers representing different heights (or depths), all transparent so that you can see what’s going on from any angle, and relatively small in size, so you can easily reach your minis.

This is my first attempt at this. I goofed up one of the lines (bottom tier, fourth from the left), but that can be fixed on the next ones. As you can see, I drew the squares with a straightedge (close enough for government work) and super-glued a single 2×2 Lego to each corner (on top and underneath). I can then vary the number of Legos between them to my preference. Five Legos are exactly 2″ in height, so that means a stack of 8 between the glued pieces makes the height 2 squares. You can call that 5′ but have plenty of room to move around the minis.

If this were done professionally, it’d be better if the gridlines were more subtle (i.e., thinner and lighter). So, next up I added a level using red ink on every other level so that the lines aren’t quite as confusing. It made things a little better, but it’s hard to see that because the quality of the lines are poor, and they were even worse because my red Sharpie smudged too much.

One bit of warning: The device requires far more precision than an impatient dude with a straightedge and Sharpie can provide. As a result of that (and perhaps the nature of Legos), the Lego connections are very sensitive to pressure. If you apply too much downward pressure, they separate. If you provide too much lateral pressure, they separate. If all your minis are human-sized, smaller columns will be more stable, but you could also tape (not superglue) the columns for some added structural integrity, which can be easily undone when you want to change the height. Or you could buy a bunch more Legos so that you can pre-make permanent stacks of varying height. Telling a nerd to buy more Legos isn’t exactly unreasonable. It’s like telling you you’re just going to have to buy more dice. Everyone’s willing to do that. . . depending on the die. Of course, none of this is an issue if you’re playing a game (e.g., Dragon Age RPG) that uses zones instead of precise measurements.

One way or the other, I’m going to use this map.

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Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to nor endorsed the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)